Ghostbusters, Godzilla, And The Apes Move Up Releases, 'Mickey 17' Hops Off

Movies making moves to plug self-inflicted schedule holes

When the major studios chose to delay many of their films far enough out of 2024, it left a lot of craters and deserts for what was left on the schedule. Further reassessments have been made, especially for this early part of the year, and the studios seem confident to bring what they do have a little earlier to fill in the holes. Namely, a few of the year’s biggest releases from Sony, Warner Bros. and Disney (well, 20th Century Studios) will now be coming earlier than previously announced.

First up, Sony has moved Columbia Pictures’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire up a week from March 29 to March 22, and will screen in IMAX and other premium large formats, it now debuts the same week as Lionsgate’s Arthur the King with Mark Wahlberg and Simu Liu and Focus Features’ The American Society of Magical Negroes, and Luca’s first theatrical release after three years from Disney and Pixar. The Afterlife sequel sees Callie, Trevor and Phoebe Spengler return to the iconic New York City firehouse, now decked out with a top-secret research lab for next level ghostbusting with Peter, Ray, Winston and Janine. But when the discovery of an ancient artifact unleashes yet another threatening entity, they must all save the world from a second Ice Age. The film brings back Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, and Mckenna Grace as the Spenglers, Celeste O’Connor as Lucky, Logan Kim as Podcast, Paul Rudd as Gary Grooberson, and of course Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts. Kumail Nanjiani, Patton Oswalt and James Acaster play new supporting characters. Gil Kenan directed from the script he wrote with the first film’s director (and Ivan’s son) Jason Reitman. I’ll leave the trailer since I hadn’t gotten the chance to do the write-up before.

Warner Bros. saw the Frozen Empire departure and jumped on it. Okay, they originally had Parasite director Bong Joon-ho’s next directorial effort Mickey 17 in the spot, but the circumstances by which there have been no trailers highly indicated it was not ready for release, so it’s gone undated. In its place, Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire regains two of the weeks it lost from its August push back, jumping from April 12 to March 29. The sequel to 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, Adam Wingard returns to direct, while Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry and Kaylee Hottle return from that film as Dr. Illene Andrews, Bernie Hayes and Jia, respectively. New cast members include Dan Stevens as Trapper. The official synopsis describes that the mutant lizard and giant ape face off “against a colossal undiscovered threat hidden within our world, challenging their very existence – and our own.” These Titans’ histories will be explored more than ever before, “their origins and the mysteries of Skull Island and beyond”, and the legendary scuffle that helped them come to be that “tied them to humankind forever."

Meanwhile, Mickey 17, whose reassigned date is expected rather soon, is based on the 2022 book Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton, with Bong writing the adapted script. It stars Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo. A man known as an “expendable” is on a mission to colonize a distant planet. Colonies send one crewmember who takes on the most dangerous jobs on the mission that are guaranteed fatal. When they do fail (and die), their memories are backed up and they are restored to cloned bodies.

And finally, Disney is getting its proper start back to the summer movie season, if a week or two later than has been customary. Instead of starting on Memorial Day weekend opening against Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and The Garfield Movie, they have moved Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes from that May 24 open to May 10, giving it those two weekends for IMAX, a luxury previous films in the franchise never got. It now opens with another Focus film, the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black, which is the week between The Fall Guy starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt and If, directed by and starring John Krasinski, opposite Ryan Reynolds.

A continuation of the trilogy that began with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Kingdom takes place 300 years after War. A new group of primates have flourished in a jungle-like world as nature has reclaimed the land. Owen Teague stars as Noah, a young chimpanzee who meets a feral human named Mae played by Freya Allan. The ape cast includes Kevin Durand as Proximus Caesar, a powerful chimp ruler who leads a coastal clan of apes in search of human technologies. Travis Jeffery and Lydia Peckham play Noa’s chimp friends Anaya and Soona, while Neil Sandilands is Koro, an elder chimp from Noa’s tribe and Peter Macon plays the wise orangutan Raka. The humans will be played by William H. Macy, Eka Darville, Dichen Lachman, Ras-Samuel Weld A’abzgi, and Sara Wiseman. I’ll include its first teaser too.

Sources: Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety